For a while I’ve felt that the Agile methodologies from the software development world share a similar outlook to the Participatory methodologies from the international development world.

So we came up with an idea for an event. Wouldn’t it be great to get an expert from each discipline and have them talk to each other, in front of an audience?

Last night, thanks to support from the Humanitarian Centre, and our two esteemed guests, our idea became reality.

Alistair Cockburn, Agile guru, sat on a sofa next to Robert Chambers, expert on Participatory approaches, in front of an audience.

I thought it was fantastic and we’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the event. It was so good, I found myself afterwards wondering if this is in general a good format for an event.

So I wanted to write a post about the form of the event, rather than the content.

After the event I was chatting with Alistair and he’d already been thinking along similar lines. We called it a “Jazz Talk”. We were drawing an analogy with two jazz musicians improvising.

Jazz Talks

Here’s the format -

1) Get two affable speakers from different disciplines
2) Sit them on a sofa in front of an audience
3) Let them talk about the relationship between their disciplines
4) Periodically interrupt them with “Kibitzers”

Kibitzer

A “kibitzer” is a person who comments on the conversation.

“Kibitzer” was a term Alistair came up with. I had to look it up, literally it means an observer of a card game who gives (unwanted) commentary.

There’s two types of Kibitzer. A “content kibitzer” gives comment on the content of the conversation. In the event last night I played the role of one of the kibitzers and asked the question “How do we get funders to engage with agile / participatory proposals?”.  All of our kibitzers last night were content kibitzers.

Talking to Alistair afterwards, he was keen to push the idea of a “form kibitzer”. This is someone who gives a commentary on the form of the conversation, not the subject matter. For instance, “I liked how speaker-A extended speaker-B’s questions to the audience”, or “Can we hear more from speaker-A?”. I think form kibitzing is less natural but likely to be shorter. It also potentially plays a facilitatory role in guiding the conversation and could help address issues like one speaker dominating the conversation.

Perhaps a mix of both types could work. Each commentary would start with a short form kibitz followed by a content kibitz.

Timing

Here’s a suggested recipe:

• a 90 minute conversation
• kibitzing every 15 minutes (eg 5 interruptions)

I’ve been wanting to write some thoughts about Digital Resilience for a while and reading Janet Gunter’s blog post about Mobile Blackouts and the Poor has prompted me into finally doing it.

I think we’re going to see the subject of Digital Resilience rising in our consciousness over the coming years… at least we should. What do I mean by it? We regularly allow ourselves to rely on information and communication technologies but these tools can be  fragile and have many modes of failure. Often this fragility is not taken into account. I see this all the time.

Here’s a typically example. I’m on the phone to a friend organising an evening out. How many times have I heard the phrase “I’ll call you when I get to town”? This relies on us both having signal, on our batteries not running out and on our phones not breaking, being lost or stolen. Modern “smart” phones eat through their batteries at a tremendous rate and sometimes crash or reboot so these failure scenarios are not that unusual. If any of the things that our phones rely upon fail what is our back-up plan? Are we going to wander around the city, aimlessly, hoping to bump in to each other? Or go home?

A failed night out is not the end of the world. The point I’m wanting to make is that most of the time people seem oblivious to the failure modes of the technology they use or the need for back-up plans. And yet when you’re in the habit of considering technological risks it becomes second nature, like finishing a sentence with a full-stop
.

So when I hear “I’ll call you when I get to town” I usually can’t help myself say “And if I don’t hear from you, I’ll meet you at the station…”

The situation gets a little more serious in a business context. Take the example of a conference call. Scheduling a call between several people can take a lot of planning trying to find a time when everyone is free. If this time-slot is missed it can represent a significant opportunity cost to the organisations involved. The duration of the call itself represents a cost when you consider the time of the people involved. There is growing use of Skype for conference calls in the professional community. Sometimes Skype works very well but in my experience it frequently doesn’t work at all. Many times I have been asked to participate in a Skype conference call with no back-up even when many of the participants are in developing countries. When the Skype call fails much time is wasted, sometimes several participants are excluded and sometimes the call is abandoned all together. My automatic response to a Skype invitation is usually to send round the number of a phone conference service just in case.

OK, failed conference calls are still not the end of the world. For someone poor or vulnerable a technology failure could be much worse. At the recent ICTD2010 conference I was very interested to hear for the first time a few people talking about vulnerabilities to the poor caused by reliance on ICTs. For years the ICT4D community has been promoting the use of ICTs in poverty reduction. There has been a fair amount of work in adapting technologies for harsh environments. However these technologies still have failure modes and it was very encouraging to hear the resulting vulnerabilities being discussed.

Digital resilience is less about building robust technologies and more about building an understanding of its failure… and the habit of back-up plans.

Mark generously gave our team training last year in “embodied management”.

It will be great to start the year with some reflection on the meaning of work and the importance of values in the workplace. This is a central theme for us at Aptivate. I’m also looking forward to participating in Mark’s training – Mark is an excellent trainer and I’ll be picking up tips for my own training practice.

There is the smell of autumn in the air reminding me that we’re on the steep part of the sine (-ish) wave of rapidly shortening day length and presumably sun altitude. Last week the PV panel was out of shadow. I noticed half way through today that a good 25% of the panel was now in shade. With my head down frantically programming in python I didn’t have time to extend the legs of the gridbeam frame. Instead I balanced the frame precariously on top of the compost bin.

The laptop started the day with a flat battery and so was drawing 5 Amps initially. I decided to forego the external monitor today. The laptop was was fully charged by lunch time so went down to 2 Amps. With the laptop suspended the power supply still draws 0.2 Amps so I unplug it for lunch. Unfortunately after lunch I forgot to plug the supply back in and didn’t realise until a few hours later when the laptop was practically flat again. It recharged by the end of the day but just as I was finishing I noticed the solar battery was shut down again despite having a relatively sunny day today.

Starting Voltage: 12.2V
Ending Voltage: 11.8V

I got through the day fine and with a full laptop battery. But by the end of the normal work day, around 6pm, especially on a cloudy day, the lack of any lights is becoming a bit difficult. The nights are drawing in and trying to read a monitor, even one on the dim “eco” setting, in a dark room is a strain on the eyes.

Rather, I should say I got through the normal 8 hour working day fine. 8 hours use a day is what I’ve been planning the solar power system around – however today has reminded me that 8 hours isn’t always what happens. For much of the evening I’ve been doing work-related reading, running down the laptop’s battery. Then I started researching into low power 12 Volt LED lights. LEDs can be very intolerant of variable voltages and get damaged if the voltage goes above their rating. With some searching I’ve found some LED “bulbs” that have voltage regulators built in so they take a range from 8 – 30 Volts and even claim to take AC or DC. I was half way through ordering a 3 Watt and 6 Watt bulb when the laptop battery screamed for help.

I hooked lappy back up to the solar battery which let me finish my order. Not long after that the solar controller shut the battery down. This is the second time now that the controller has shut down the battery. It’s the weekend and I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off work so I’ve got 4 days to charge the battery back up again… although I’ll be at Barcamp Brighton this weekend. Maybe I should take the panel and the 33kg battery with me… or maybe not.

End of day battery voltage: 11.8V

In that spirit I thought I’d talk about some of the deltas of the solar power experiment…. nah, forget it, I’ll just winge!

Last week I was travelling about a lot so didn’t really work off the solar supply. Which meant it had at least a good 4 sunny days of charging before I started day 7. At the start of the day the battery voltage was 13.2 Volts, the highest it’s ever been. We ended the day at 12.7V. Day 8 started at 12.7V ending at 12.1V. Both days were very cloudy, so you’d expect the load to take more out of the batteries than the PV panels replaced.

When I run my typical setup, an IBM x41 tablet (running Ubuntu, of course), the iiyama 24″ monitor in eco mode and charging my mobile phone off the laptop USB port, I’m taking just under 5 Amps (about 60 Watts). The battery, if full, should be able to supply 5 Amps for about 20 hours, or about 2.5 days. The recommendation (considering the UK’s propensity for cloudy days) is to have 4 days of reserve.

The first wingy-deltas are that the battery is under-dimensioned for my load. It’s been pretty sunny so far and I still ran out of power a few days ago. I suspect that the PV panel is also only half as big as it needs to be to replenish my load, even at this relatively sunny time of year.

When I run the 24″ monitor and laptop from the 12V supply I get buzzy stripes over the screen – they’re not so visible when looking at things that are mostly white, but on darker backgrounds it’s a real issue. If I unplug the laptop from the 12V power supply the lines disappear. My laptop has only got an analogue SVGA connection and I suspect I’m getting some kind of “earth-loop” effect picking up mains hum. The whole solar power system is currently un-earthed (is this wise?). Or maybe it’s something to do with the laptop power supply dirtying up the signal for the monitor, although I swapped the supply for the Maplin’s generic DC-to-DC converter/regulator and the problem was identical. I could  partially test this hypothesis by plugging the monitor into the mains and seeing what happens. I also seem to remember at “Small Is…” we were getting the same issue which went away when we used a digital signal cable instead of analogue, an option I don’t have with my laptop.

When the IBM laptop is charging (ie drawing a large current) and I put the PixelQi/Samsung netbook on to charge as well then the IBM starts making a terrible buzzing sound and the battery state starts falling rapidly – in about 5 minutes it will go from nearly full to half empty. I don’t know if this is causing permanent damage or what’s going on. The laptop has also buzzed sometimes when the monitor is on full brightness. This might have something to do with trying to pull too much current out of the battery when it’s in a low state of charge. We’re speculating that the laptop power supply might be going through some rapid cycle of trying to draw current from the battery, the battery voltage dropping and then the power supply shutting down abou 20 times a second. That’s just a wild guess.

The battery has never yet been fully charged – the solar charger has not yet shut down charging because the battery was full. Perhaps I should have started this experiment by fully charging the battery before putting any load on it, but I was too eager to start.

I need to permanently fix the PV panel to something so I don’t have to keep taking in at night and putting it out during the day… like some bad cat. I also need to drill a hole in the side of the house to run the PV cables through so I don’t have to keep running them out window.

I’m on mains power today as I’m pair-working with Nate from the Skiff. I haven’t yet got a battery solution for working from the Skiff. Chris has warned me that charging a lithium-ion battery can be tricky and if you get it wrong they explode. However Ni-MH batteries are much more forgiving and similarly light in comparison to lead-acid. I’m wondering if it’s better to get a bigger/newer lithium-ion for the PixelQi/Samsung to get a full day out of it and get an Ni-MH battery just for the pair-working iiyama screen (about 15 Ah of load) or get a battery that will cope with my normal daily load (about 40 Ah of load).

A cloudy day. This is one of the interesting things about taking responsibility for my electricity production – it’s not just that I replace the electricity I used to use. The awareness I am getting is modifying my behaviour.

I generally think of myself as someone who tries not to waste energy. I turn lights off when I leave rooms etc. But trying to run my working life off an under-dimensioned solar power system is being a real education in energy wastage.

Today I’m having the usual one hour lunch break. Normally I would probably leave my computer on. Today I don’t even suspend the laptop, I shut it down completely… and unplug its 12 volt regulator. I want to see 0.00 amps flowing out of the battery when I’m not using it.

I’m also aware that I’m starting the day with a fairly empty battery and it’s cloudy – so today I’m not using the external monitor…

(time passes)

…I got through the day but around 5pm the solar charger shut down the load to protect the battery from getting too flat. So I worked the rest of the day, up to 6:30, using the internal battery of the laptop. By the end of the day I’ve got 10 minutes battery left on my laptop, about the same on the Samsung / PixelQi netbook and a shut down deep cycle battery. Hmmm. (I’m actually writing this blog entry on Day 6 because I ran out of power on Day 5)

Day 6

The forecast was for sun this morning, potentially worsening through the day. I’m starting the day with an empty solar battery and no reserves on the laptops. I have to get up early (early for me anyway, if not early by international standards) to get the panel out. At a push, the sun starts being usable from about 8am so I’ve got 2 hours to get enough charge on the battery.

Luckily, yesterday evening, the 15m extension cables for the PV panel arrived so I don’t have to lug the battery around. I start by dragging the panel upstairs to the east facing bedroom to try and get the early sun. By the time I’ve got it all plugged in the sun’s rising high enough that it’s hitting the doorstep out the front. I take it down there instead. The panel’s bigger than any of the panes in our windows so there would always be a shadow from the window frame which would seriously reduce the power output.

As the minutes tick by I’m glued to the multi-meter watching the voltage slowly climb, repeatedly running out the front, rotating the panel to face the sun. (There is some debate about whether it is better to spend money on mechanical trackers or on more static PV panels instead. However manual tracking is free… if a complete pain in the back-side.) It gets to 10am, time to start work, and the solar charger is still disconnecting the load. I use my last few minutes of laptop battery to skype in to the office for the morning meeting and then, with a sad face, I plug the laptop into the mains. I’ve broken my mains-free diet. And what’s even more irritating is it’s a gloriously sunny day. There’s probably enough power coming off the PV panel to run the laptop directly, but I’m not set up to do that… yet. Digital-Resilience #fail.

I’m hoping the battery will get enough charge over the weekend to see me through next week. Until I’ve built my office-cum-shed with the south-facing roof in the garden, I’ve got nothing to attach the PV panel to in a permanent way. We’re away for the weekend and I’m worried the panel might go for a walk if I leave it out in the garden so it’s currently inside standing vertical against a west-facing window. Knowing the PV panel is less than optimally placed is taking some of the joy out of the fabulous sunshine we’re having today. I did try and persuade the family to bring the battery and panel away with us. They think I’m obsessed. Luckily for family relations the panel is too big to fit in the boot of the car and the battery is too heavy to carry on the train.

If I make even more gridbeam I could, in true agile fashion, just make the roof of the shed.

I am using the equipment we used for the “Small Is…” festival to see if I can go “off-grid” for my work electricity requirements. This is a pilot to investigate the possibility of the whole of Aptivate being powered by renewable energy.

Because my house faces East-West, to get the morning sun means either dragging the panel through the house and putting it outside the front door or dragging it down the far end of the garden. Trying the garden this morning – it will be interesting to see how the sector of sun moves across this part of the garden.

Right now I’ve only got about 4 metres of cable to run to the PV panel which means I have to drag the 33kg battery down the garden too – made all the more difficult today because I broke my toe yesterday running into my baby’s high-chair!

Really I need to get the panel up higher… which means drilling more gridbeam.

Today was going to be a particular challenge to stay “off-grid” as I’m supposed to be pair-working out of “The Skiff” with Nate. I’ve had a last minute reprieve as Nate’s not going to be there until the afternoon – but how do I stay off grid there? The battery is too big to carry.

For pair-working we want to use a decent sized screen. We use an one of the Iiyama 12 volt 24″ monitors, which in Eco mode takes about 20 Watts. Interestingly the Samsung N220 netbook we have can drive the big screen quite happily. It would be useful to get a bigger battery for the netbook anyway, so I could conceivably run a whole working day off the netbook’s battery. That only leaves powering the monitor.

There are small lead acid batteries that I could carry to the Skiff. For an 8 hour day I would need a battery with about 20 Ah. That’s 20 Watts / 12 Volts  x 8 hours x 1.5. The 1.5 is to make sure the battery never gets below 1/3rd capacity as this would shorten its life.

A shadow has shifted and is covering one of the cells on the PV panel, and if the voltage from one cell drops it tends to pull the others down with it apparently, so be back in a minute…

…ow! Never try and cut back brambles without gloves. I didn’t realise this solar experiment would be so dangerous.

A 20 Ah lead acid battery would weigh about 6kgs – which could just be carried but is on the heavy side. The screen takes about the same power as a netbook, so I’m wondering if a lithium-ion battery would be more appropriate – they are about a third of the weight. I imagine I would need some kind of charge controller for it – the solar charge controller is specifically for sealed lead acid batteries.

…Nate and I didn’t use the large screen for pairing today so I’ve got through day 4 without mains electricity using the battery in my laptop and netbook for the afternoon.

battery voltage at the end of day 4:  12.11V

FacilitationCamp is on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st of August. Book a place now, while there are still places left.

In Aptivate we have come to understand that facilitation and participation are key ingredients for any successful I.T. project. The benefits can run the other way too – I.T. can facilitate a community to participate in decisions that affect them. We are very interested in seeing communities in developing countries benefit from I.T. in that way.

We are very excited to be part of FacilitationCamp. Facilitating decision making, conflict resolution and building consensus are core skills we use every day. We are eager to share our experiences and learn from other in this important area.

For more details see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Cambridge

CrisisCamp is a movement of volunteers, many are technologists and IT professionals, that have come together in a number of cities around the world in support of relief efforts around the world. The initial CrisisCamps were in response to the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010. Since then over 2000 volunteers in nearly 20 cities have come together to volunteer their time and skills.  Aptivate is continuing its support for CrisisCamps by hosting the next camp, on 14th August 2010, in our offices in Cambridge, supported by the Humanitarian Centre.  The focus of this camp will be to support the start up of a CrisisCamp in Pakistan in response to the recent floods.

For more details and to register for one of the limited, free tickets see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Cambridge